Conclusions
As we mentioned in our introduction, it's been quite a long wait for the Radeon HD 4850 X2 to hit retail, but thankfully Sapphire have finally brought us out of our misery by introducing this SKU themselves - so, has it been worth that several month wait?
In a word, yes - The lack of direct competition for NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 280 has been arguably one of the biggest chinks in AMD's graphics board line-up ever since the Radeon HD 4800 series first saw the light of day, but pairing a couple of RV770 cores together with 2GB of GDDR3 memory here is exactly the right tonic to compete with the competition's flagship offering. While it doesn't manage to beat the GeForce GTX 280 across the board, Sapphire's Radeon HD 4850 X2 performs superbly in every title we threw at it at 1920x1200 with anti-aliasing enabled, and what's more it also provided playable performance in the vast majority of these titles at 2560x1600 with MSAA in use, above and beyond what NVIDIA can offer at a similar price point from a single card. This kind of performance has previously only really been the boast of the Radeon HD 4870 X2, so to see the Radeon HD 4850 X2 stake a similar claim is exciting news for 30" LCD owners who don't want to plant down the vast outlay required to purchase AMD's flagship part.
Of course, it isn't all plain sailing for the Radeon HD 4850 X2. For a start, the board is the longest I've seen in quite some time, making it a squeeze in our test system and potentially ruling it out of others. Idle power consumption is also higher than a GeForce GTX 280, but then again this can be said of any Radeon HD 4800 series board, and at least power draw under load is equivalent, with the Radeon HD 4850 X2 sporting lower temperatures to boot. Perhaps the biggest downside to Sapphire's offering as a complete package is that the cooler is extremely loud under load at its default settings - Again though, this can be lessened by using Catalyst Control Center's new built-in fan control tools. Lastly, if you already have a CrossFire capable motherboard, then a pair of 1GB Radeon HD 4850 cards will probably still cost you less than the Radeon HD 4850 X2, which is potentially worth some consideration.
We also can't ignore the old "single GPU versus multi-GPU" debate that parts like this always bring forth. Certainly, there are still occasions where using a single GPU for 3D rendering is better (particularly where you're CPU limited) and running a multi-GPU configuration leaves you at the mercy of driver updates as new titles are released (particularly considering that AMD has still done absolutely nothing about giving users the ability to create their own CrossFire profiles), but in defence of parts like the Radeon HD 4850 and 4870 X2 I have to say that the end-user experience with AMD's multi-GPU boards is head and shoulders above what it was even a year ago, to the point where it doesn't feel like you're running such a configuration at all - Both graphics cores were utilised in all the titles we tested (including brand new games like Far Cry 2), micro stuttering didn't raise its ugly head and everything "just worked". In short, the reasons for avoiding multi-GPU configurations haven't been totally removed, but they have been significantly reduced to an impressive degree.
In closing then, Sapphire's Radeon HD 4850 X2 fills a gap in the market and fills it well, arguably defeating NVIDIA in the last high-end market segment where they had any breathing space, and bringing the possibility of gaming on a 30" LCD with anti-aliasing enabled to an even lower price point. It's the kind of thing that we can only salute, and while this board isn't perfect by any means, the vast amount of horsepower it has to offer will certainly catch the eye of hardcore gamers who want to tap into that power.
